I'm taking a look at s2member -- I have it running, and my site is very slow -- it's taking on average about 9 or 10 seconds to load.

This is the site:

I want to figure out if the s2member plugin is causing it to be slow. And whether there are other faster membership plugins...

3 questions:

1. Are there particular settings or things specific to s2member that I should take care of to ensure s2member doesn't make my site slow?

2. If I deactivate the plugin to test the speed of the site with the plugin deactivated, will that mean I'll have to respecify s2member settings when I reactivate it? After it's reactivated will members' accounts work ok?

3. Anybody have observations on s2member or other wordpress membership site plugins and their affect on site speed?

I'm taking a look at s2member -- I have it running, and my site is very slow -- it's taking on average about 9 or 10 seconds to load.

This is the site: http://richardclunan

I want to figure out if the s2member plugin is causing it to be slow. And whether there are other faster membership plugins...

3 questions:

1. Are there particular settings or things specific to s2member that I should take care of to ensure s2member doesn't make my site slow?

2. If I deactivate the plugin to test the speed of the site with the plugin deactivated, will that mean I'll have to respecify s2member settings when I reactivate it? After it's reactivated will members' accounts work ok?

3. Anybody have observations on s2member or other wordpress membership site plugins and their affect on site speed?

• plugins

• 2 Can you disable the plugin to compare page load times? Might want to rule it out right off the bat. – Steve Commented Nov 28, 2012 at 16:31
• i've done that a few times now - seems to be faster with plugin disabled, then i re-enable it, and the site stays faster, then after a while it seems to slow again... unless those results are just chance... – Richard Commented Nov 28, 2012 at 22:26
• I've been using s2member on a few client sites for a year or two now I'd guess. Never seen or heard of performance impacts from this plugin. But anything is possible. – Steve Commented Nov 28, 2012 at 23:53
• You might want to take a look at Plugin Performance Profiler – Johannes P. Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 5:09

2 Answers 2

If you disable a plugin (don't delete it), the settings should be preserved for when you reactivate it.

s2member and other membership plugins are pretty complicated and may cause performance issues... especially if you are on shared hosting or a host that severely limits the # of simultaneous database queries. If you manage the server yourself, increasing the MAX_CONNECTIONS property for MySQL can often help with stuff like this. (e.g. if your host limits simultaneous queries to 100 and you typically have 80 queries, but 280 with s2member activated, your page loads will be 3x as long.)

The other performance issue to think about with membership sites is that having pages different based on membership level breaks any caching you may be doing. So maybe you have good load times because of caching, and when s2member is enabled, your site can't be cached anymore.

Here are some plugins to help you troubleshoot performance issues with WordPress: http://wordpress/extend/plugins/p3-profiler/ http://wordpress/extend/plugins/debug-queries/ http://wordpress/extend/plugins/blackbox-debug-bar/

FWIW, I'm the developer of Paid Memberships Pro, a competing membership plugin for WordPress. (It's totally free in the WordPress repository: http://wordpress/extend/plugins/paid-memberships-pro/)

Before optimizing settings or making any other decisions, first test and find the real problem of your slow website. Like maybe the problem in your hosting or any other plugin or your heavy theme or any other. So lets debag the problem...

Step 1. Temporarily deactivate s2Member & test speed using GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights. If you want to find any difference then problems in other things.

Step 2. Check database queries (use Query Monitor plugin) to see if s2Member is slowing things down.

Step 3. If the problem is in the plugin, then Use caching plugin, sizable unused features from plugin, Remove unused conditionals in S2Member, optimize database with WP-Optimize, use free CDN like Cloudflare.

Step 4. If the problem is not in the plugin, then...

Change hosting or theme or change membership plugin, here are some great options to try.

MemberPress – Feature-rich but better optimized than s2Member

ARMember – Faster than s2Member, one-time payment, great for performance-focused sites.

Restrict Content Pro – Lightweight & optimized, good for minimal membership needs.

Paid Memberships Pro – Offers good flexibility, but can be slower if using many add-ons.